A DEGREE OF THE SURREAL,

THE NOT-ENTIRELY-REAL,

AND THE MARKEDLY ANTI-REAL

About

1. The turbulent flow of air driven backward by the propeller or propellers of an aircraft. Also called race2.

2. The area of reduced pressure or forward suction produced by and immediately behind a fast-moving object as it moves through air or water.

intr.v.slip·streamed, slip·stream·ing, slip·streams

To drive or cycle in the slipstream of a vehicle ahead.

3. a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction and fantasy and mainstream literary fiction.

The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, in July 1989. He wrote:

"...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility."

Slipstream fiction has consequently been referred to as "the fiction of strangeness," at the heart of which is a cognitive dissonance..

Slipstream falls between speculative fiction and mainstream fiction. While some slipstream novels employ elements of science fiction or fantasy, not all do. The common unifying factor of these pieces of literature is some degree of the surreal, the not-entirely-real, or the markedly anti-real.

Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

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it was not meant to be so long but life has its own purposes, it seems to me, within which my will and desire are no more than receptive or resistant pawns.

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for instance, I wanted to write about India. I had just returned from a week that felt so full it might have been three; filled with connections, rich impressions, raw contrasts, the forging of unexpectedly deep friendships. I was looking forward to writing it out, needed to get it out of my head.

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even now, weeks later, pieces of India are floating in my mind, floating through the present like vivid dreams.

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travel always unsettles mewhen I am on the move, makes me restless when I return. Perhaps that is why, despite all the traveling I have done, I am a reluctant traveler. I have what I have come to regard as the gift of being able to be content where I am, wherever I am (mostly), which means paradoxically that any departure is a wrench, even one I chose to make.

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it is a truth universally acknowledged that home becomes piercingly sweet on the verge abandonment. And part of me secretly fears I will never be able to come back. Yet I go. I always go…

gazing down at the shining ocean surrounding Santorini Island, or walking through over-peopled Fira, in between bouts of furious work, thoughts drift through my mind like untethered boats.

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theydo not drop anchor, displacing the muse. They are not visitors from Porlock to break the dreaming threads unraveling out of me.

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they pass through me. I feel no need to make sense of them, though some float into the current of creation, are drawn in and consumed. I am in that waking dream state most condusive to writing.

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i am on the story road.

the dreamtrails.

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i hear a snatch of words, see a pose struck, a hat fly, a guide point, a feather float down, a plastic bag rise and turn itself inside out. I see all of the brides and the flowers and that brown faced dapper celebrant who always wears his immaculate cream suit over strangely brightly coloured shirts; blue or emerald green or egg yolk yellow.

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so many weddings pass me by. Was it always like this? I don’t remember so many in other years. Somedays five or six wedding processions pass down and then up the steps past my terrace in a single day.

but there are places which, though you may never have been there before or even thought of going there, answer a question your soul did not know until then, that it was asking. I felt this sense of profound recognition the first time I stepped out of a car as a young journalist on assignment, and went for a walk along the stretch of coast I now call home, near Apollo Bay. I felt it when I was at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland.

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it was how I felt in Iceland.

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we didnot go there directly. In truth travel is rarely direct in a real world or metaphorical sense, and people who imagine the means are divorced from the end are as wrong as those that imagine the end can justify an abhorrent means. The journey is part of the destination. We reach our destinations via means that shape and hone our seeing.

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and ofcourse the place you leave and how you leave it shapes you, too.

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the day we left Prague was the last day of my daughter’s nine years of schooling in Czech. The last day of year nine, and the beginning of the end of our European sojourn. By the end of the year we will be back in Australia. Everything is tinged … continue reading